Mist Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Mist Falls [map], out in the Columbia Gorge -- although "Mystery Falls" might be a better name for it. It's just down the road from Multnomah, Wahkeena, and all the others, and by all accounts, it's the second-highest waterfall there after Multnomah (although sources disagree on just how tall it actually is). For all that, almost nobody knows it’s there. It doesn’t have a large official sign at the trailhead like the others do. It doesn’t even appear on many maps of the area. If you've read this blog before, you know I can't resist a mystery like that. I'm going to wonder why, and keep wondering, and not be able to rest until I find out, because that's just how I am.

I’d vaguely heard of Mist Falls before, since it's mentioned in the print and online versions of the Waterfall Lover's Guide to the Pacific Northwest, but the guide doesn't tell you exactly where it is, or what it looks like, and for some reason rates it a mere one star, down in the "not worth turning your head to see" category. Then when I was digging around for info for Monday's gorge waterfall post, I ran across more info about the falls, and I just had to go find the place.

The crib note version of the falls: They're just west of Wahkeena Falls, are as much as 500 feet high, and do, in fact, run year-round, despite popular misconceptions to the contrary. And there's a trail up to the base of the falls, although the trail's hard to find, and difficult to navigate once you find it.

I figured I'd start out with a link dump about the falls. I researched the place on the net before setting out, so doing a link dump first is sort of going in chronological order. (Don't worry, there's more pics after the link farm. I don't really like how the waterfall pics are bunched up towards the bottom of the page, but that's how the piece wrote itself. If you just want to look at more photos, the scrolly wheel is your friend.)

• Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest describes the falls in various places as either 400 or 500 feet tall. I'm terrible at guessing heights, so either sounds reasonable to me. This site is where I figured out where the falls were, and learned there was a trail. Well, a kinda-sorta trail. We'll get to that part in a bit.
• Lewis and Clark's Columbia River has several good photos, along with (naturally) excerpts of Lewis & Clark's journals as they explored the area.
• A great photo of the falls, taken from across the Columbia. Presumably with a much more expensive camera and lens than I've got.
• Ash Creek Images has a nice photo of Mist Creek and the base of the falls. It's just one of several pics of the area at that site.
• Another photo, although the caption claims the falls are inaccessible and seasonal, neither of which is precisely true, technically speaking.
• The Salem Public Library has an old photo of the falls. The exact date is unknown, but it's from somewhere in the 1879-1909 timeframe.
• Yet another photo, this time mislabelled as Dalton Falls, another obscure waterfall due west of here. This is the sort of confusion that occurs when you don't put up signs and so forth.
• The World Waterfall Database describes the falls as:
  

  
  This is one of the tallest waterfall in Oregon State, however, due to the creek's small drainage area, they are not very appreciated. The falls usually retain some volume throughout the year, however, they do run almost dry in the late summer, and may dry out in drought years.
  

  
  Fortunately(?) this year is anything but a drought year. I don't think they'll be anywhere close to running dry this year.
• The falls were mentioned during the Congressional hearings that led to the present-day National Scenic Area:
  

  
  The timbered lands below Mist Falls, which is over 1000 feet high and which borders the highway, were sold for $7 and $8 an acre -- and logged.
  

  
  A thousand feet high. Wow. Well, Congress wouldn't lie to you, would they?
• A 1907 issue of Mazama magazine gave the same figure. You'd think the Mazamas would have their numbers straight, but I suppose people weren't so big on precision a century ago. They just rounded up to the next-greater order of magnitude and called it good, I guess.
  
  Unless the falls really are a thousand feet high, and modern sources are wrong. I doubt that's the case, but if people wanted to believe Multnomah's the tallest, not some obscure interloper to the west, I can see how it'd be easy to overlook certain inconvenient facts. There's probably a really great conspiracy theory in this somewhere.
• Oh, but it gets better. In 1940's Oregon: End of the Trail, the Federal Writers' Project described the falls thusly:
  

  
  MIST FALLS, 159.8 m., where the water drops from a 1,200 foot escarpment were thus mentioned by Lewis and Clark: "Down from these heights frequently descend the most beautiful cascades, one of which [now Multnomah Falls] throws itself over a perpendicular rock. . . . while other smaller streams precipitate themselves from a still greater elevation, and evaporating in mist, again collect and form a second cascade before they reach the bottom of the rocks."
  

• And that's not all. An old guidebook by the California Automobile Association describes Mist Falls:
  

  
  Then comes Mist Falls, where a great body of water is driven to near-nothingness before it reaches the bottom of a cliff, 1500 feet below.
  

  
  1500 feet. Golly.
• A 1916 Oregonian story by one Eva Emery Dye declined to estimate the falls' height, but waxed poetic about Mist Falls and its neighbors:
  

  
  A mile east of Shepperd's Dell, the Bridal Veil shimmers like the Staubbach, the Dust-brook of Switzerland, and three miles more, Mist Falls leaps like Nuuanu stream back of Honolulu, to be dissipated and blown into space long before reaching the waters below.
  
  Out of Punchbowl Crater, 1300 feet deep, springs Wahkeena, full panoplied like Minerva springing from the head of Jove, winged with foam and bubbles, cutting huge gorges on its way to the Columbia, a roaring cataract, tumbling, foaming, spouting icy-cold as the underground glacier in which it has its birth.
  

  
  People just don't write like that anymore. Certainly the newspapers never do. Possibly that's for the best.
• The Virtual Tourist mentions the falls on its Off the Beaten Path Multnomah Falls page. Usually lists that use the phrase "off the beaten path" are anything but, so I'm pretty impressed to see Mist Falls on the list.
• Another great page full of info at OregonHikers, along with one reader's report, "After work to Mist Falls", with a bunch of great photos and a detailed writeup about the trail. That report is what really made me want to find the place ASAP.

So this is the unmarked trailhead to the falls. This was taken heading east on the old Gorge Highway. Like all the instructions say, if you get to Wahkeena Falls you've missed it and you'll need to turn around and go back. There's also a larger pullout further west, so it's also possible to pull off the road too early. I'm not sure what the other pullout is for; I stopped and looked around but didn't see anything interesting. In any case, if it doesn't look like this, you're in the wrong place.



Off to the left, across the highway from the mini-parking lot, are railroad tracks and a lake the maps just call "Fish Rearing Pond". If there's no lake across the street, you're in the wrong place.



So here's the trailhead itself. As you can see, it's pretty overgrown and unmaintained, and this is the good part of the trail. It's all uphill from here. If you look at the photo with the road, the trailhead is near the center, between the parking lot and the highway. If you look at that pic on Flickr, I've added a couple of notes showing the location of a few key things.



This little plaque is one of the key things I mentioned. If you see this, just a few feet from the start of the trail, you know you're in the right place. For those troglodytes out there who still use Lynx or have "load images" turned off, the caption reads:

THE PEOPLE OF OREGON HEREBY EXPRESS THEIR GRATITUDE TO ROSE M. LENSKE FOR THE DONATION OF THIS FIVE ACRE TRACT OF LAND FOR PARK PURPOSES -------- OREGON STATE HIGHWAY COMMISSION 1971

So apparently Mist Falls is actually a super-obscure state park. Coolness. Tracking down obscure parks is another weird mini-hobby of mine, so Mist Falls counts as a twofer. So who was Rose Lenske, and what's the deal with the rock walls around here?

This page at Ash Creek Photo tells the story. There was a hotel here called "Multnomah Lodge" from 1916 up until the 1950s, and the rock walls were part of it. I haven't found a lot of info about the lodge -- it's a matter of finding it within the mountain of info about present-day Multnomah Falls Lodge. I did run across a 1916 mention of the lodge and the falls, in a state publication titled "The Mineral Resources of Oregon":

Multnomah Lodge is three and one half miles beyond Bridal Veil, a delightful hostelry, where visitors find both cheer and the fullest satisfaction of ordinary physical needs. Mist falls is a mere filament of water, so slender that before half of its sheer drop of near a thousand feet is made, it is none else than a spray of mist—hence its name.

The Ash Creek piece mentions Rose Lenske's "colorful" husband Reuben, linking to a juicy Willamette Week story about a fight over his estate. Kind of entertaining, although a bit off topic. The lodge's old fireplace is supposed to be around here somewhere (another photo here), but I wasn't able to find it, try as I might. I looked all around and didn't see it, but then, my powers of observation aren't always the best. Maybe I'll have to go back and look again or something. Back in January 2001, the Columbia Gorge Commission discussed removing the plaque, as it apparently doesn't meet their present-day criteria for memorials in the area. They must've changed their minds, though. The plaque is still there, and even looks like it's been cleaned recently.



Another remaining sign of the old lodge is this cover over a storm drain on the highway, next to the trailhead.



If you stand directly on the drain cover and look uphill, you can catch a glimpse of the top of the falls, as shown here. You can't actually see the upper span of the falls when you're closer to it, so you'll need to do this to really get the full experience. Actually the view's slightly better if you stand in the street, but Legal says I can't advise you to do that.



So here's part of the actual trail. It doesn't give a good idea of just how steep it is, but you're clambering straight up a loose talus slope. It's not so much a trail as a climbable rockpile. This is the open part of the trail; other parts are equally steep but hemmed in with bushes. I didn't take too many photos on the trail, and most of them came out on the blurry side. You can't see the falls during the first segment of the hike. After the open slope you get to a large rock. If you thread yourself between the rock and the drop to the creek, you'll finally catch your first good glimpse of it:



And if you turn around, the view out over the Columbia is pretty good too:



Keep forging ahead, and you'll get to the base of the falls eventually. It's not a long trail, but it can be slow going, and why hurry, after all?





There are even a few flowers. You didn't really think I'd get through a whole post without any flowers, did you?

So why is the place so obscure? Why aren't there any signs -- for the falls, the trail, the state park (whatever it's called)? Why is the only trail an unmaintained use path? Why all this, when the other falls along the highway all have first class visitor facilities? I have a few theories:

First off, many of the sites that bother to mention the falls at all give a disclaimer that there isn't a lot of water, even though there was when I visited. Possibly it does go dry in dryer years, or possibly it's just a meme that goes around. Interestingly, the older mentions of the falls don't give the low-volume disclaimer. Was there more water once? Global warming, perhaps?

So some people think the falls fail to impress because of their lower volume. I don't buy that, myself. Any amount of water falling 500 (or 400, or 1500) feet is innately impressive, especially in this setting. I gather waterfall purists (and they do exist) turn up their noses at anything that goes dry, or nearly dry, in the summer. Even if Mist Falls did dry up in the summer like nearby Dalton Falls , so what? Then you'd just want to visit some other time of the year. If it's flowing while you're there, why do you really care whether it dries up for a few weeks six months down the road? Silly purists. Feh.

Second, the present trail is really freakin' steep and narrow, and can be scary when wet. The trails at other falls around the gorge are pretty newbie-friendly, so if you just put up a big sign and didn't change the trail, there'd be trouble. At Multnomah Falls it's not uncommon to see people strolling up the trail, latte in one hand, the leash of an exitable Lab puppy in the other, yapping away to their broker or somebody on their hands-free Bluetooth headset, utterly oblivious to their surroundings. Try doing that on the Mist Falls trail and you're in for a rude and possibly painful surprise.

I'm sure they could put in switchbacks, stable surfaces, handrails and such. Building trails isn't rocket science. It's just a simple matter of throwing enough money at the problem. Unfortunately, since the state owns the land, finding said money would be an epic adventure. For all I know, Mist Falls has been in the pending queue for improvements since 1971, waiting for funds to become available someday. It wouldn't really be fair of me to make fun of the state for not having any money. Still a real shame, though.

Third, obscurity breeds obscurity. If you don't know the falls are there, you don't visit, and you don't lobby for or make improvements. If all the other falls have nice amenities, and this one doesn't, you naturally assume there's a good reason, and it's not worth fussing over the place.

Much of today's infrastructure in the gorge still dates back to the building of the Gorge Highway or shortly thereafter. At that time, and until 1971, the Mist Falls area was in private hands and so didn't get all the fancy stonework and trail engineering and such that the others got. Mist Falls wasn't in line when the goodies were handed out, nearly a century ago, and there hasn't been a second round of handing out goodies, so therefore it doesn't have them. Thus illustrating why it's good to get it right the first time, because you never know if or when you'll get another chance.

Some Waterfalls in the Gorge

Bridal Veil Falls, in Bridal Veil State Park. When I stopped by last week, I had a curious experience: Nothing looked familiar. I'm sure I've been there before, I must've been, and on more than one occasion I've driven right by figuring there was no need to stop, as I'd been there not too long before. But the more I think about it, it must've been a very long time indeed. If ever. Because it all looked new to me, rightly or wrongly. I like to think I know that part of the gorge like the back of my hand, so it was quite an odd feeling.

There's a short trail down to the falls, and an even shorter, flat trail that the signs describe as a "walking/interpretive" trail, with some native plants to observe, etc. The latter sounds pretty boring, so that I'm quite certain I'd never taken it before. I figured I would this time just on a lark, and it turns out the trail also leads to high cliffs over the Columbia, with vistas stretching for miles in all directions. Once there I recognized the fences at cliff's edge, having seen them from the freeway. I'd always wondered what they were for. I'd post some pics from the overlook, but this post is about waterfalls, and I do hate to wander off topic.

Bridal Veil Falls is not to be confused with the many other waterfalls by the same name. There's one in Yosemite, one that's part of Niagara Falls, and others in North Carolina, Utah, British Columbia, and elsewhere.




Youngs Creek Falls, Shepperd's Dell State Park. Or you could just call it Shepperd's Dell Falls. A lot of people do, including myself when I'm not feeling pedantic. And yes, it's really spelled "Shepperd", not "Shepherd", because the guy who donated the land spelled his surname that way.

That's a lot of naming confusion to have for such a small place. There's a small parking lot, and a very short trail down to the top of the falls. No connecting trails or anything, so once you've been down and back, you're pretty much done here and it's time to move along to the next one down the road, which is Bridal Veil if you're heading eastbound.




Multnomah Falls. Like, duh.




Latourell Falls, Guy W. Talbot State Park. The tiny town of Latourell is nearby, although you can't see it from the main road. Nothing much to see or do there, though.

This one may be my personal favorite in the Gorge, although Elowah Falls (not pictured) is a good candidate too. And there are still a few I haven't tracked down yet, so nothing's set in stone.

And no, the name is not spelled with an 'e' on the end.




Wahkeena Falls. If you're lucky enough to run across any really old books about the Gorge, Wahkeena was once called Gordon Falls, long, long ago. That's about the only interesting bit of trivia I know about the place. It's never been my favorite, although I've never been able to put my finger on why that is. I dunno, maybe the feng shui is out of whack or something.

You might look at a map and notice Benson State Park right next door, with its cool and (allegedly) safe for swimmin' lake. You can't get there from here, though, at least not without crossing some very busy railroad tracks, and I seem to recall there were very official-looking signs ordering you not to even think of crossing there. There also isn't a path between Benson State Park and Multnomah Falls. Maybe that's because Benson is a fee area, and they don't want people sneaking in from across the tracks lugging a raft to avoid the $3 day use fee. Or maybe it's because both waterfalls are on Forest Service land and Benson's run by the state, and the two agencies just don't collaborate on projects for whatever reason. Beats me.




Starvation Creek Falls, west of Hood River at Starvation Creek State Park. The name comes from a train that was temporarily stranded here by snow back in the 1880s. Nobody actually starved, though. The name's just a bit of Victorian melodrama.

You may recall Starvation Creek as the highway rest area that was closed for quite a few years after the plumbing failed and the state had no money for repairs. Instead of putting closed signs on the restrooms themselves, they closed the whole thing, blocked off the offramp and everything. I've never understood why they did that. Anyway, everything's supposed to be all fine and dandy now, at least until our fair state's next financial or infrastructural crisis comes along.




Horsetail Falls is right next to the old Gorge Highway, so it can be amusing to sit for a bit and watch people driving by taking their tourist photos without even stopping, much less getting out of their cars. When the passenger's taking photos as the driver gabs on a cell phone, you're almost moved to pity. When they return home, they'll wonder why they don't feel any more relaxed than they did before leaving on vacation.

There are a couple of even more photogenic falls up the trail a ways, but most people just call it quits without getting past the parking lot. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but the day I took this I numbered among those people. At least I got out of my car, though. And really I have an excuse: I've got to hurry around like a madman to keep up with the incessant demands of this humble blog's zillions of Gentle Reader(s). If I don't generate new content on a regular basis, people will show up at my door with torches and pitchforks. That's not actually true, of course, but I only said it was my excuse, and I never claimed it was a very credible excuse.




Mosier Creek Falls, Mosier OR. Last week, I'd made it a goal to try to track down at least one waterfall I'd never been to before. First I was going to try to find Coopey Falls, but it's on the grounds of a convent, and I chickened out at the thought of nuns. And I missed the super-obscure trailhead for Mist Falls, even though it's just down the road from Wahkeena Falls. So I eventually ended up all the way out in Mosier, between Hood River and The Dalles, and they've got a waterfall right in town. I think it's actually a city park, not state or federal, if I read the signs right. You follow the Columbia River Highway signs until you cross the bridge over Mosier Creek. On your right, you'll see a sign for the local pioneer cemetery. Take the trail leading to the cemetery. Trust me on this. The cemetery itself isn't too overwhelming, with maybe a dozen headstones, tops. To your right, Mosier Creek flows in a deep canyon. If you continue along the trail, there's a sign announcing you're at "Pocket Park", with all sorts of dire warnings about primitive trails, rattlesnakes, and such. I didn't see any snakes, and I didn't find the trail especially primitive (by my standards, anyway), so maybe they're just trying to ward off non-taxpaying out-of-towners or something. After a short walk, you'll see the falls.

I admit this isn't the best picture ever. The light was at a very difficult angle, and you can tell from the rocks that there's a lot more water going over the falls other times of the year. Pretty much anytime other than midsummer, I imagine. But this was primarily a scouting trip, so you take what you can get.

I ran across a site a while ago with some pics of a guy taking a kayak down these falls, when the creek was running a bit higher. I've lost the link now, but if I find it again I'll post it here.




Shady Creek Falls, right near Multnomah Falls. Never heard of it, right? If you take the trail up to the famous bridge at Multnomah Falls, you'll cross a smaller stream at one point. If you look upstream/uphill, you'll notice there's another waterfall way up there. There's no sign telling you the name of the thing, and I didn't realize it even had a name. And officially it doesn't, but over the years it seems the stream's often been called Shady Creek, and thus the falls are Shady Creek Falls. So now you know.

I've never thought they were especially impressive so far as waterfalls go, although it's also true that you really don't get a very good look at them. The falls proper are way up the slope, and the main thing you see from the trail is the creek burbling its way steeply downhill. So it's hard to say, really.

Bonnie Lure State Park

Some photos from Bonnie Lure State Park [map], on Eagle Creek out near Estacada. I'd never heard of the place until recently, while I was looking at the state parks website. The state parks department was running a photo contest for their 2008 calendar, so I thought I'd check the place out and see if there was anything photogenic there. It later turned out that my puny little camera doesn't have enough megapixels to meet the minimum entry requirements, and I doubt I'd have entered any of these anyway, but I figured I could still get a blog post out of the excursion, at least.



The park's a pretty low key affair. The state calls it a "State Recreation Site" officially; I don't know precisely how that differs from a regular state park, but there's no sign at the parking lot, so you pretty much have to know it's there. There are a few trails, but they're unmarked, and I don't know where they go. The main event is river access to Eagle Creek [map #2].



It seems the park is a local swimming hole in the summer, and a local fishing hole in season. Most of the info on the net is about fishing, like these two examples. It sounds like the place gets sort of tense in fishing season, since the other bank of the creek is private property, and the property owners have gotten sick and tired of trespassing fisherfolk.

A couple shots from around the bridge & parking lot shown in the "map #2" link:





Here's one report of a visit to the park, by someone who wasn't very impressed with the place. (The page also has cute pix of puppies.) Probably had something to do with the drunken teenagers. There weren't any of those when I stopped by, just a couple of families -- kids splashing around, parents reading and working on their tans, everyone just having a carefree and uncomplicated summer day.





I'll let you in on a secret: I was playing hooky from the office when I visited, using the old "working from home" trick. Stop gasping in dismay, everybody does it now and then. The now-past calendar deadline was fast approaching, and I figured I ought to go get a move on and go hit as many state parks in one day as I could. But after wandering around for a bit, I sort of got into the spirit of the place, took my shoes off, and cooled my feet in the creek while trying to remember how to skip rocks. It comes back to you pretty quickly, in the right circumstances. So that was pretty fun, I mean, what's the point of playing hooky if you don't get to skip any rocks? So then I got ambitious and thought I'd see if I could toss a rock in the air and time it just right so I could get a photo of the splash. Cameras are always right handed, so it helps a lot if you throw left handed, which I do. Here's the best of the batch. It may not look like much, but it looks like "Mission Accomplished" to me...

blimp+heart

Another old scanned photo from the archives. This was taken during an Indy car race at PIR, back in the late 80's or early 90's. I seem to recall I went because it was supposed to be this great father-son male bonding thing. Dad thought it was great, and I was bored absolutely snotless. I've since concluded that fast cars are only fun if you're the one driving. If you're watching someone else do it, nothing could be more boring and tedious, with the possible exception of baseball.

I'm not sure I even have any photos of the cars, but I saw this and though it might make a nice picture. And since that was the era of film cameras and 1200 baud modems, and the interwebs were only for graduate students, and there was no such thing as a "blog", the photo promptly went into a box and I forgot all about it until recently. So here it is. I'm still not sure I've got the hang of repairing the colors in scanned photos to match the original, but this is basically what the original looks like.

If I was a multibillionaire, I think I'd need a gigantic zeppelin to cruise the world with, just because I could. The fact that no actual multibillionaire has done so is even more evidence (as if we needed any more) that the wrong sort of person floats to the top under the present system.

more flowers -- deal with it.

Updated 1/29/2011: Enlarged the photos here due to the updated blog template, which I'm trying to do for all old posts over time. The defensive tone of the title sems a bit quaint in retrospect, considering how many flower photo posts I've done after this one.

Macleay Park sidetrip

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A few months ago, I did a post about public stairs in NW Portland, in which I semi-promised you the post you're now reading:

From here, the hike directions usually send you up Luray Terrace and into Macleay Park, from where you loop back around down into NW Portland. That's sort of what I did too, but I'm trying to keep this post reasonably focused on stairs, if I can. I've got park photos too, but we'll save those for another post, ok?

So these pics are from Macleay Park, up in the West Hills, some from the popular trail along Balch Creek, and others from the obscure chunk of the park south of Cornell, where a few trails winding around in the forest, eventually ending up at the Pittock Mansion if you go far enough south. The southern section is perhaps not as scenic as the stretch of park along Balch Creek, but there are also far less people there. If you just want to get away from the crowds for a while, this is a decent area for it.

The first photo is of the famous Stone House ruins, not far from the Balch Creek entrance to the park. Some people think it looks creepy and it's been nicknamed the "Witch's Castle", but the true story is less exciting, or at least less supernatural. It was actually built in the 1930s as a public restroom, believe it or not. It looks like this because the federal Works Progress Administration built it, and the Northwest branch loved building everything out of stone, in a very distinctive style. They did this for showpiece projects like Timberline Lodge, as well as mundane stuff like the flood control works along Johnson Creek at Tideman Johnson Park, and public restrooms like the ones here. Apparently the building was abandoned after the 1962 Columbus Day Storm damaged it, and it's fallen into picturesque ruin over the last half century.

If you look at a trail map of the park, you'll see something called the "Tunnel Trail". I took it, but it turns out to be much less exciting than it sounds. It's a short cutoff trail that heads down to one of the road tunnels on Cornell, which you can't (or at least shouldn't) walk through as a pedestrian, even if you like tunnels as much as I do. There's a separate pedestrian path that bypasses the tunnel, but at least you do get a look at the old WPA-era stonework, if you're into that sort of thing.

Scanning through the slideshow, you might notice that it has a high percentage of closeup shots. It's not that I didn't take any photos with wide vistas of the forest, it's just that I didn't care for most of them. It's a nice walk, but the forest it passes through is fairly generic, with the usual uber-Northwestern assortment of ferns, moss, fir trees, slugs, and so on, along with the same invasive species you see in other "natural area" type parks around the city, primarily ivy and blackberries.

now available in glorious monochrome

I was trying to think of an interesting photo experiment that wouldn't be hampered by the ongoing bad weather, and I hit on something just in time for the weather to improve. I thought I'd try to make a photo look like old-sk00l clip art from back in the Mac Plus epoch, which means no color, not even greyscale, just black dots and white dots, cleverly dithered to give the appearance of a wider tonal range. There's probably an easier way to do this in GIMP (and feel free to chime in if you know what it is), but I figured I'd export the photo as XBM, the ancient X Window Bitmap format, then reload it and clean it up a bit. Believe it or not, your friendly neighborhood web browser probably supports XBM, so long as that browser is Firefox (or Netscape, probably). I thought about uploading them as XBMs but Flickr isn't interested in cooperating, and I'd hate to deprive you poor IE users out there. So I re-exported them as JPGs, which also made the files substantially smaller. XBM is an uncompressed format. In fact, XBM is a text format. In fact, XBM is really just a C header file that declares the image as a gigantic array, believe it or not, with each char representing 8 monochrome pixels. That's pretty cool if you ask me. In XBM, the top photo starts out like this:

#define IMG_7049_width 2272
#define IMG_7049_height 1704
static unsigned char IMG_7049_bits[] = {
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
...

And continues for another ~3MB.

I trust the Steel Bridge needs no introduction, and neither do the Convention Center towers.



I like the top two photos, but they don't quite have the look I originally had in mind. The old classic Mac series had a screen resolution of just 512 x 384, roughly the size of one of the scaled-down images here, so one of these would've taken up the whole screen, all 9 inches of it. So I tried the same process on a couple of lower res pics, and I think this is more like what I was aiming for, although they're still a bit on the modern-technology side. The first one is of the westside Fremont Bridge ramps, in the remnant industrial zone between the Pearl and the NW 23rd/21st area.



And here's the inevitable Rusting Chunks photo, in glorious monochrome:

...wherein I get scanned...

I've been playing around with scanning 3D objects lately, using that crappy 10 year old flatbed scanner I got for free a while back.

When it came time to select test subject #1, the choice was obvious.

It turns out that my alter ego has a few siblings out there on the Series of Intarwebs. The travel adventures of one sibling are documented here, while another has a series of domestic escapades here. Others siblings have unusual adventures of their own, both animal and vegetable.

Sadly, not all Bendies have such a cushy life. The sad, fiery end of one such Bendy is documented here. Oh, the bendumanity!

River Spirits

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So here's another of the munchkin-sized art parks along the MAX Yellow Line. This little spot of land is known as the Ainsworth Greenspace, because it sits at the corner of Ainsworth St. & Interstate Avenue. It's home to the sculpture you see here, "River Spirits"

TriMet describes the spot as:

Three tree totems with poetry written by students at Ockley Green Middle School surround a small plaza.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to describe them as totems, but I suppose they're sort of totem-ish, and they do have a sorta Northwest Indian theme, despite being made mostly out of rusting steel bits welded together.



One mildly curious thing is that although the place was created with your urban renewal transit dollars, it's not actually next to a MAX stop. You might catch a quick glimpse of it from the train as you speed by, but that's about it. Possibly someone just thought the corner could use a little sprucing up, and it's hard to disagree there. On one side you have a depressing 60's-era middle school that tends to bring up the rear in those pesky "No Child Left Behind" rankings. Right across the street there's a controversial and reportedly quite skeezy porn store.



I'm not 100% convinced the sprucing-up job is a success, though. If you number among this blog's femto-armada of Gentle Reader(s), you already know I'm not a huge fan of rust, not on cars, not on art, basically nowhere. Ok, so this particular sculpture has an intriguing texture if you look closely enough, or at least it does at present. But people look at you funny if you do that, and given the park's immediate neighborhood, you can sort of imagine why.

It's possible the place is a touch more cheery when the sun's out. Like that ever happens, I mean.



Look closely at the above photo for a moment. A little closer. There, that's good. You're getting sleeeeepy. So just relax and keep looking at the spiral. Now get out your credit cards and... No, I kid, I kid.



If you've been in Portland for any length of time, you've probably seen this face motif before in some form or other. It's derived from a locally iconic example of tribal rock art out in the Columbia Gorge. It's one of the very few such examples we've got around here, so we've sort of been beating it to death over the last decade or two, and it shows up everywhere, often without explanation. Like most people in the Northwest, I've never actually seen the original in person, although I think I saw it in HD on OPB once.

The other two river spirits are supposed to be a crow and a salmon. And sure, yes, they're proper native imagery and so forth, but when I see this stuff I always end up lamenting we don't have more interesting wildlife around these parts. Like snow monkeys, say, or wild parrots, or giant tortoises, or echidnas, just to name a few off the top of my head. I mean, salmon? Borrrrrringgggg.....

A Series of Intarwebs

Apropos of nothing, I just discovered that the phrase "series of intarwebs" appears nowhere on the Series of Intarwebs, at least according to Google. That surprised me a little, so I figured I'd go ahead and address the problem.

Actually I shouldn't say "apropos of nothing", when it's clearly apropos of Ted Stevens . I know I don't talk politics a lot here anymore, but this thing is comedy gold.

Speaking of comedy gold, the David Vitter story sure disappeared quickly. Call me a cynic, but that makes me wonder just who else is on the infamous madam's list. Newspaper editors? Publishers? TV news execs, maybe? Hmmmmm...

Semi-obligatory Mill Ends post

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If you read any list of Official Quirky Factoids about Portland, before long you'll come to the obligatory bit about Mill Ends Park, which is supposedly the world's smallest city park, as far as anyone knows -- although the similar claim about Forest Park being the largest was debunked a few years back, so this may or may not be true. Either way, this is the place, in all its glory.

Occasional updates:

• 7/31/2010: Added an aerial photo to hopefully give a better idea of where the park is, and just how small it is. Hint: It's the round green bit in the middle of the intersection of Naito & Taylor, a little above the "Mill Ends Park" Wikipedia link. Yes, Wikipedia's wrong again. Big surprise there, I know.
• 1/29/2011: On the other hand, if you go to the aforementioned Wikipedia article about the place, you'll notice that its top photo of the park looks extremely familiar. Creative Commons FTW.
• Updated 9/5/2022: It seems someone has finally accepted the challenge of making a park even smaller than Mill Ends. In July 2022 the small city of Talent, Oregon unveiled one thatʻs a whole 78 square inches smaller, as a cheap way to cheer people up as the town rebuilds after a devastating forest fire back in 2020. I mean, you canʻt really be mad at them for doing that when you understand why, although the Portland Parks & Rec Bureau scoffed that rival park in Talent has no leprechauns, which is true as far as anyone knows. I would also like to point out that the park in Talent is a hexagon, which places it in an entirely different category than normal, non-hexagonal city parks, so the two arenʻt really direct competitors. And even if they were, if you measure smallness by the ratio of the park area to the total area of the city -- which is entirely reasonable -- Mill Ends is still the smallest by a wide margin. See, there are 4,014,489,600 square inches in a square mile, and Portland is much larger in area than Talent at 145 square miles vs 1.33. So Talentʻs park is 0.000000070047014 of the overall city, while Mill Ends takes up just 0.000000000776498 of Portland. Youʻll probably need to copy those numbers into Notepad or count the decimal places a couple of times to be sure, but by the ratio method Talentʻs new park is a whopping 90.2 times larger. So thereʻs that, at least. Though Portland is by no means the largest city by area in the US -- weʻre way down in 77th, in fact, if you count consolidated city-counties, so the largest one (Sitka, AK, believe it or not) could potentially beat us (ratio-wise) completely by accident with a 10ʻ x 10ʻ plaza, big enough for a park bench or maybe two. So thereʻs a potential downside to that approach too, I guess.

Since I was primarily looking for good IR shots, I had the camera set on ISO 400, and forgot to switch it to "Auto" for the broad-daylight ones, which is why they look a little weird. I'd go take more, but I have no idea when it's going to be sunny again, if ever, so I figure I might as well just go with these.

The last photo is from about a block away from the park. This marker refers to some sort of "Lewis and Clark Botanical Memorial" that isn't actually there, as far as I'm able to determine. I realize I'm not that skilled at identifying plants, but none of the plants listed on the sign are in evidence nearby. I also don't recall that there was anything special here before the big Naito Parkway remodel, either. So in a sense it takes up zero square inches, vs. Mill Ends' 452, which isn't even a fair fight. Although in another sense it's merely tied with a vast number of other nonexistent places, and you can't very well compile a complete list of those. So I suppose the Botanical Memorial has to be disqualified on a technicality....

My uber-belated OBF 2K7 post

As I mentioned before, I went to the Oregon Brewers Festival last week. I posted a few photos earlier, but I haven't gotten around to working my notes up into a proper post. I really did intend to just go and try a short list of beers this time. I was very firm about that being the plan. But it turns out there are plans, and then there are plans.

It's a bit late to do a proper writeup now, with formal tasting notes, star ratings to 3 decimal places, and so forth. I barely remembered all these beers while I was in the middle of drinking them. And now it's even more of a hopeless task. So instead, here are my raw notes I took on the ol' Blackberry.

There were beers after those listed here, but I ran into friends at that point, and nerding out on the BB seemed a tad rude. And thus my subsequent zymurgical impressions were lost to posterity. FWIW.

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Thursday

Started with Pliny. I just don't learn, do I? But it's so good, though...

Klamath golden next. Better than I expected, can taste the hops after pliny. Darker, maltier. Nice. Revise comments on beer trip post.

Calapooia Yankee Clipper IPA
Oooooh. Blurb says "crisp", I thought this beforehand. Good for me. Too bad there's no reason to visit Albany...


"Woooo!" I didn't join in

Bourbon Barrel Dubbel from Flying Fish
Weird after other beers - minty/vanilla/? Ohhh right. Bourbon. Weird how that goes. I don't think the belgians use bourbon barrels. Their loss - offsets the cloying "candi sugar". You warm up to it.

Max's - Farmer's Daughter. Not coming through as well, 7 abv saison. Nice, clean. Spices? Trying because new brewpub. Tigard, trying to be local just to tigard - "bioregional". Quaint, eccentric. Some there there, but not that much.

Ninkasi Believer - "double red". Got to love our usa utilitarian style labels. Doesn't constrict the imagination.
Ooh. Great. Hoppy and very dry, almost roasty. Should be wife's favorite beer. 7abv

Why do I see dslrs everywhere now?

Proper woooo : guy's on phone, starts a woooo so person knows where he is.

Industrial IPA - diamond knot. Missed them at spring fest. Dang, it's an ipa but 8.2 abv. Alcohol comes through - "hot"
It's to the hard-to-taste point now. I'll need another one of these in other circumstances.

Hops as decor. HopUnion tent is doing a hops petting zoo, bless their hoppy little hearts.


Food options include fondue, garlic fries

Red Thistle Quercus - barrel aged red thistle. Not overwhelming vanillin like dubbel. Hoppy, a little acidic? Quite different than vanilla (non-vanilla?) Red Thistle.

You can only go so far intellectualizing beer.

Betsy Ross Imperial Golden - philadelphia's
7abv. I like the place. Have a naming issue I think, people don't realize they're local or think they're a chain., maybe they don't mind.
No strong opinion. Nice, crisp, fresh, golden. Lawn mowing... After! Not before.

Just did a wooo. It always happens eventually.

Will have porter next. There's always a contrarian.

72 beers = 12 beers * 6 pods. Nice and Mesopotamian, appropriately.

Donner party porter
Sweet molasses flavor, not so much hops as some. Contrarian blurb. About hop monster next door, which was a safe bet. Although actually between a witbier and an extra pale. It's a nice change. Kinda roasty, etc.

Last year made snide comment about thurs. Beerfest, but good. People have to work tomorrow. More mellow, not a uk-style binge, although heard guy getting wasted, going to timbers at 7 - hooligan.
+++
Tg Triple - term grav. Hoppy , nice. More ipa than belgian, thankfully.

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Friday

Triple threat IPA - lucky lab. Ohhhh. Very hoppy, piney. Favorite?

Red zone
Dusty trail - floral, clean
Bayern pils - typical, fine.
Titan ipa
Lava rock porter

Ram Double Exposure. Good, friend hates it.

Bitch Creek ESB. More of a red, guide says so. Good name tho.

Above Wishram

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Here are a few more gorge photos from the mini-roadtrip, this time from a little viewpoint off Hwy 14, just east of Wishram, Washington [map].

Directly across the river from the town are present-day Celilo Park and Celilo Village, and the gap in the distance is where the Deschutes River flows into the Columbia. This viewpoint once would have given you a great view of Celilo Falls, the sixth-largest waterfall on earth by volume, but it's been submerged behind the Dalles Dam since 1957. This was obviously an obstacle to migrating salmon, and the falls were a major native fishing site for at least 15,000 years, right up untl the dam went in. I've always thought that building the dam was a criminal act; the one consolation is that (per recent sonar evidence) the falls are still intact down there underwater, and in the long term nature always bats last.

Present-day Wishram is basically a railroad company town way out in the middle of nowhere in the eastern Columbia Gorge. There's a bridge over the river nearby, but it's rail-only, and no passenger trains use it, so you basically never see or hear anything about it. I'm not sure what there is to do in Wishram, but you can get there on Amtrak if you really need to.

Here's a better view of the town, down at river/railroad level so it's not even on the main road. It's got to feel a little isolated down there sometimes. I wonder what it's like down there in the winter, when the road up the bluff to Hwy 14 ices up?

It's not really the most touristed part of the gorge, but I've always found the area fascinating. A desert canyon, all bare rock and dry grass, with a truly huge river flowing down the middle. There are a lot of places around the world I haven't been, but I have to think this is a little on the uncommon side.

From the Chamberlain Lake viewpoint

Here are a few mini-roadtrip photos of the eastern Columbia Gorge, taken at the Chamberlain Lake Safety Rest Area, on the Washington side of the river just off Highway 14 between White Salmon & Lyle.

The lake itself is weirdly hard to see from the viewpoint named after it. We're on a rocky promontory over the river, and the lake is east of us, with two other rocky promontories between it and us. Honestly it would have made more sense for this to be the McClure Lake viewpoint, since that's the lake directly across from us on the Oregon side of the river. But hey, I gather there really is a lake in the area somewhere, although I didn't see it while I was at the viewpoint. There are photos of the lake, and more of the viewpoint, here.

Look at the pics of the river for a moment. See all those whitecaps? The Chamberlain Lake viewpoint is extremely windy. It would be a very bad place to wear that old pair of parachute pants you've had in your closet since the M.C. Hammer days. Well, everywhere would be a very bad place for that, but here would be more dangerous than most. So you can't say you weren't warned.

wednesday photos: purple

This post begins and ends with plums, with flowers in between. I didn't plan it that way; I was just rummaging around looking for photos I hadn't posted yet, and I soon noticed a theme developing. I normally avoid color-based themes; it's a tad art-school-esque for my taste, and probably for yours as well. But when the one thing all the photos have in common is a whole lotta purple, sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

For what it's worth, the plum you see here was on a stone wall in inner SE Portland, just outside a scary-looking correctional (I think) building of some sort. There was probably a good camera angle I missed, juxtaposing the plum with the concertina wire in the background, but I didn't really feel like hanging around there any longer than I did. I guess I just wasn't in the mood to suffer for Art that day. Well, whatever.